Saturday, March 19, 2016

Alex Badeh Already Indicted Himself Last Year

The ongoing trial of
former Chief of Defense Staff Alex Badeh recalls an article I wrote about him
nearly a year ago (see my August 8, 2015 article titled “Boko Haram, Alex Badeh, Jonathan and the Stolen Trillions”) in which he basically indirectly
pleaded guilty to the charges now preferred against him. Read on:

I thought I had become inured to the scandal of brazen
corruption in Nigeria until I watched the interview former Chief of Defense
Staff Alex Badeh granted to Channels TV on August 1. It’s the worst form of
self-indictment I’ve ever seen in my life.

Badeh told Channels
TV that the last time the Nigerian military bought any equipment was some 9
years ago, that is, in the twilight of Obasanjo’s second term. “If I go down
memory lane, I think the last time any piece of equipment was bought for the
Nigerian army was some APCs that were bought in 2006, and how many were they?
They were few,” he said, pointing out that the Nigerian military flies “the
oldest fighter aeroplanes in the whole world.”

Alex Badeh

The Alpha jets that form the backbone of the military
onslaught on Boko Haram, Badeh told Channels TV, were bought in 1981. If Badeh
is right (and I have no reason to think he is wrong since he was Nigeria’s most
senior military officer until his sack), that basically means that, from Musa
Yar’adua’s administration when the Boko Haram menace started, to the end of the
Jonathan presidency when it reached a crescendo, not a single piece of
equipment was purchased for the Nigerian military.

The military depended
on obsolete equipment at best and no equipment at all at worst to fight a
determined and sophisticated Boko Haram. If I didn’t hear this directly from
Badeh himself, I would have dismissed it as some wacky conspiracy theory.

But it isn’t the revelation by itself that is scandalous; it
is the fact that the neglect of the military is coterminous with the
extravagant ballooning of the Nigerian military’s budget. In 2010, for
instance, government budgeted N836,016,773,836 (which translates to $5.07
billion at 165 naira to a dollar) for the military. In 2011 the amount ballooned
to N1,080,894,801,178 ($6.55 billion). In 2012 it increased to
N1,154,857,159,110.00 ($6.99 billion). It increased even more in 2013 to
N1,178,832,576,309 ($7.14 billion). Last year, it was scaled down a bit to
N1,174,897,477,334.00 ($7.12 billion).

That’s trillions of naira gone down the begrimed pockets of
corrupt government officials in the name of fighting Boko Haram! My head spun
as I looked at the figures. Now, Badeh says in spite of these trillions that
the Jonathan government budgeted for the military, “the last time any piece of
equipment was bought for the Nigerian army was … in 2006!”

So what happened to the trillions of naira? Every Nigerian
should be asking this until we get an answer. After a whopping $32.88 billion
in military budget to fight Boko Haram in the last five years, we don’t have a
single piece of military equipment to show for it. This simply boggles the
mind. It’s beyond scandalous; it’s unacceptably and insanely criminal.

In spite of all that money, hundreds of thousands of our
compatriots in northeastern Nigeria have been murdered—and are still being
murdered daily— by Boko Haram, and thousands more are internally displaced and
writhe in unspeakable hardship. Lives have been disrupted, businesses have
collapsed, and thousands have lost even the will to live. Yet one of the men
who superintended over the criminal enterprise that was military budget goes on
TV, without a tinge of moral compunction, to gloat about the incompetence of
the government he was a part of. I am angry, very angry. This sort of criminal
impunity should never go unpunished.

We are talking here
about the twin evils of unconscionably mindboggling theft and of the
heartrending destruction of the life of an entire region of the country. I know
President Buhari is aware of the scale and depth of the criminality that
characterized the military budgets in the last 6 or so years, but we should
still prod him to not only recover the stolen trillions but bring to justice
the criminals who masterminded this astonishingly conscienceless heist.

This is all the more unpardonable because from Badeh to
former President Jonathan, and all the minions in-between, the fact of the
Nigerian military’s unpreparedness, which was all too obvious to even a
perfunctory observer, was intensely denied. Military officers were
court-martialed and sentenced to death for refusing to fight Boko Haram with
bare hands. In other words, they were condemned to death for refusing to commit
suicide. Fighting a well-armed enemy with bare hands is suicide. Pure and
simple.

But, in press conferences, Alex Badeh passionately defended
the death sentence passed on soldiers who mutinied and ran for their lives. Now
he admits that the military he headed had no equipment to fight Boko Haram.

Former President Jonathan also once threatened to withdraw
soldiers from Borno State when the state’s governor said Boko Haram was better
armed and more motivated than the Nigerian military—a fact Badeh has now
admitted. During a February 25, 2014 presidential media chat, Jonathan said,
“The statement is a little bit unfortunate because you don’t expect a governor
to make that kind of statement and if the governor of Borno State feels that
the Nigerian Armed Forces are not useful, he should tell Nigerians. I will pull
them out for one month; whether he will stay in that his Government House; just
one month, but I will fly back to take over the state.”

When you add all this to the recent revelation by
SaharaReporters of a N1,751,864,867
($8,853,600) fraud in the Office of the National Security Adviser over
purchase of arms and ammunition to fight
Boko Haram, which never made it to Nigeria, all lingering doubts that the
Jonathan presidency was a massive criminal enterprise are removed. I don’t know
what would have become of Nigeria had Jonathan won another term.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.